The hymn of Pascha, sung over and over through the Easter season and used as a greeting between people in that season. It is also sung at the burial of a Christian who dies during Easter week, which is where its use at a death comes from.
Every text below comes from the edition named under it and was checked twice, independently, before it appeared. Neither check was a person. That is a claim about wording only: nothing here is selected or endorsed for a particular situation, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed it. Older spelling is kept as the edition prints it.
Christ is Risen (Hapgood 1906)
The hymn of Pascha, sung over and over through the Easter season and used as a greeting between people in that season. It is also sung at the burial of a Christian who dies during Easter week, which is where its use at a death comes from.
English · Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church, 1906
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down Death by death, and upon those in the tomb bestowing life.
Isabel Florence Hapgood. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1906. Published 1906, before 1929, US public domain, and the translator died in 1928. Retrieved and verified 2026-09-17. Source
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Hapgood's is one English rendering among several, and most parishes today use a later one; hers is printed here because it is the one that is out of copyright. She is also not consistent with herself. The same prayer appears with different punctuation in different services of the same 1906 volume, so this is the text as printed in the Order for the Burial of the Dead (Laymen), and makes no claim to be the only form.
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The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.
